Poem
The Beat Goes On
Ron Kolm
It was a slow night in the bookstore
so I went over to the literature section
and grabbed a copy of Celine's
Death on the Installment Plan
and took it back to my post
at the cash register.
I hid it under the counter
...
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Review
TAXI NIGHT — Poetry by Cliff Fyman — Review
Marc Olmsted
TAXI NIGHT
Poetry by Cliff Fyman
Long News Books
$15.00
I connected with Cliff Fyman some years after his association with Naropa University (then Institute) and its 1977 Summer Writing Program - a heyday-hosting of teachers like William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I met him through then-fellow student writers Peter Marti and Vincent Zangrillo.
Although late in the book, there is this poetic statement from Fyman, and it sums up his view:
I see every object alive
and luminous
and at the same time I
see the decay and death
inherent in it’s very shining.
Cliff Fyman is essentially influenced by William Carlos Williams and his school of Objectvism, something Allen Ginsberg returned full circle to in his teaching at Naropa. Cliff learned to sit in the Buddhist style of “calm abiding,” shamatha. Add to that - he is also a vegetarian as we...
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Poem
At the Chelsea and 2 more poems
Linda Kleinbub
At the Chelsea
The cover band plays Blurred Lines
beer is cold
skin is tan
far away, my mind writes our story
I’m Nancy Spungen
we grunge around rat-infested subway cars
from CBGB to The Bitter End
we room at T...
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Poem
Three new poems by Yuko Otomo
Yuko Otomo
Albers and Morandi: Never Finished
1. seeing
I prefer to see with the closed eyes.
- j. a.
To achieve understanding, it is necessary not to see many things,
but to look ...
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Review
List Full: List Poems of Necessary Orderliness – Review
Jim Feast
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Poem
228
Don Yorty
A homeless woman with her legs spread on
a park bench looks ready to shit. Good God
she is pulling her pants down with paper
towels about to do it. Vacationing
anarchists are camped out by the water
fountain. It is hot...
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Poem
Pale House
William Considine
You cannot and should not enter The House of the Inquisitor.
Its pale stone frontage with carved floral ornaments is locked
And uninviting. It was built in 1780 - so late! - when this town
Was larger than any in your c...
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Review
The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel – Review
Sparrow
The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel
by Marc Jampole
Poets write novels invertedly; the language comes first, then the plot ‒ if there even is a plot. In his Acknowledgments, Marc Jampole mentions a number of poems that have been transformed into prose in The Brothers Silver. My favorite poet-novels are by Beat luminary-turned-Zen Buddhist monk Philip Whalen: Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head and You Didn’t Even Try. Both are gentle, sad, inconclusive portraits of San Francisco in the mid-1960s. The writing is deceptively simple, but there is a poet’s languor; a sense of the narrator watching patiently, from a great distance. Jampole writes tempestuously, with rising and flipping wordplay:
Desire to play Oberon in the school play claws at me. This hunger doesn’t rest, to say out loud in front of everyone, “At a fair vestal thronèd by the west….” To a mirror twin, I exclaim my lines for hours. Audition day I ...
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Poem
Two Poems by Andrey Filimonov, translated by Anton Yakovlev
Andrey Filimonov
These poems were written in the mid-2010s in Siberia, in the ancient city of Tomsk, where it's not such an easy task to fix a Mac. In fact, repairs of any kind tend to be a problem. Nineteenth-century houses tilt to the side...
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Poem
Building Muscle
Kelly Cowan
playing
Visit California CD
8 songs -
“get into that unique
California state of mind”
on exercise bike
building muscle
after surgery
Mamas and Papas -
in rhythm
Kool & the Gang -
now I’m moving
w/ cooke...
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Review
(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn) – Poems by Jim Feast — REVIEW
Thaddeus Rutkowski
(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn)
poems by Jim Feast
Autonomedia
$16.29
The subtitle for Jim Feast’s latest poetry collection, “Poems for Lady Bunny: Chicago, 1972–1975,” clues us in to the time and place for these basically metrical, mostly long poems. As Feast explains in his introduction, Lady Bunny was a painter who served as his “muse, mentor and she-devil’s advocate.” This book, then, works as a tribute to and elegy for this artist, who died in 1977. Many of the poems are dated in the early to mid-1970s, when Feast was a young man. The book has an attractive cover painting by R. Brown Lethem.
In the book’s first poem, “For the Painter, Lady Bunny,” Feast describes one of Bunny’s “compositions” and by doing so sets out his aesthetic purpose:
The room draws near to the red beads
of rain on the window. The sun settles
like a rose covered over in snow. Now ...
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Poem
A poem by Boris Khersonsky, translated from Russian by Nina Kossman
Boris Khersonsky
A poem by Boris Khersonsky
Translated from Russian by Nina Kossman
***
three kings gathered in one golden sarcophagus
in the Cologne cathedral that survived the bombing
king on king prophet on prophet and magic...
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Review
Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems – Review
John Pietaro
Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems, Unexpurgated Edition
Black Scat Books, 2020
Yes, it really is that Ed Wood. Recalled in cult movie circles as the bizarro planet’s Orson Welles, Wood was writer-director-producer ...
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Poem
In The Shark World
Francine Witte
In the shark world,
even, there are rules, laws
about sleepswimming and razor
teeth and what the sharkbelly
wants. Like my father and his own rules,
laws for his kingdom, our tiny
apartment with the neighbors’ fo...
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Review
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates – Poems by Rich Ferguson – Review
Kathleen Reichelt
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates
Poems by Rich Ferguson
Moon Tide Press
In his newest book of poetry Rich Ferguson promises a puzzle. Or according to the poet, collaborations “with clouds creating poems continuously changing shape & meaning, depending how you look at them”. Rich doesn’t disappoint. Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, published by Moon Tide Press and released in January 2021, delivers this and more.
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, poems by Rich Ferguson
In the eight section book, Rich Ferguson begins his lunar journey with relationships that end. When Rich addresses the tear from his mother who handed me over to the brass-knuckled moon in “A Worry Bead, a Blessing” and the amnesiac moon, a lunatic laundromat robbing me of my quarters in “When Her Blood-Red Kiss Stains My Breath”, he isn’t mixing his metaphors. The theme of moon repeats throughout this book, carefully...
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